Democratic Party

Contents

The Democratic Party is one of the two major political parties in the United States, and the nation’s oldest existing political party. After the Civil War, the party dominated in the South due to its opposition to civil and political rights for African Americans. After a major shift in the 20th century, today’s Democrats are known for their association with a strong federal government and support for minority and women’s rights, environmental protection and progressive reforms.

DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICAN PARTY

Though the U.S. Constitution doesn’t mention political parties, factions soon developed among the new nation’s founding fathers.

But in 1792, supporters of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who favored decentralized, limited government, formed an opposition faction that would become known as the Democratic-Republicans.

Despite Washington’s warning against the danger of political parties in his famous farewell address, the power struggle between Federalists and the Democratic-Republican Party dominated the early government, with Jefferson and his supporters emerging largely triumphant after 1800.

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The Federalists steadily lost ground in the early 19th century, and dissolved completely after the War of 1812.

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JACKSONIAN DEMOCRATS

In the highly controversial presidential election of 1824, four Democratic-Republican candidates ran against each other. Though Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and 99 electoral votes, the lack of an electoral majority threw the election to the House of Representatives, which ended up giving the victory to John Quincy Adams.

In response, New York Senator Martin van Buren helped build a new political organization, the Democratic Party, to back Jackson, who defeated Adams easily in 1828.

After Jackson vetoed a bill renewing the charter of the Bank of the United States in 1832, his opponents founded the Whig Party, led by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky. By the 1840s, Democrats and Whigs were both national parties, with supporters from various regions of the country, and dominated the U.S. political system; Democrats would win all but two presidential elections from 1828 to 1856.

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION

In the 1850s, the debate over whether slavery should be extended into new Western territories split these political coalitions. Southern Democrats favored slavery in all territories, while their Northern counterparts thought each territory should decide for itself via popular referendum.

At the party’s national convention in 1860, Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge, while Northern Democrats backed Stephen Douglas. The split helped Abraham Lincoln, candidate of the newly formed Republican Party, to victory in the 1860 election, though he won only 40 percent of the popular vote.

The Union victory in the Civil War left Republicans in control of Congress, where they would dominate for the rest of the 19th century. During the Reconstruction era, the Democratic Party solidified its hold on the South, as most white Southerners opposed the Republican measures protecting civil and voting rights for African Americans.

By the mid-1870s, Southern state legislatures had succeeded in rolling back many of the Republican reforms, and Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation and suppressing black voting rights would remain in place for the better part of a century.

PROGRESSIVE ERA AND THE NEW DEAL

As the 19th century drew to a close, the Republicans had been firmly established as the party of big business during the Gilded Age, while the Democratic Party strongly identified with rural agrarianism and conservative values.

But during the Progressive Era, which spanned the turn of the century, the Democrats saw a split between its conservative and more progressive members. As the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, William Jennings Bryan advocated for an expanded role of government in ensuring social justice. Though he lost, Bryan’s advocacy of bigger government would influence the Democratic ideology going forward.

In his first 100 days, Roosevelt launched an ambitious slate of federal relief programs known as the New Deal, beginning an era of Democratic dominance that would last, with few exceptions, for nearly 60 years.

DIXIECRATS

Roosevelt’s reforms raised hackles across the South, which generally didn’t favor the expansion of labor unions or federal power, and many Southern Democrats gradually joined Republicans in opposing further government expansion.

Then in 1948, after President Harry Truman (himself a Southern Democrat) introduced a pro-civil rights platform, a group of Southerners walked out of the party’s national convention. These so-called Dixiecrats ran their own candidate for president (Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina) on a segregationist States Rights ticket that year; he got more than 1 million votes.

Most Dixiecrats returned to the Democratic fold, but the incident marked the beginning of a seismic shift in the party’s demographics. At the same time, many black voters who had remained loyal to the Republican Party since the Civil War began voting Democratic during the Depression, and would continue to do so in greater numbers with the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Upon signing the former bill, Johnson reportedly told his aide Bill Moyers that “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”

Over the course of the late 1960s and 1970s, more and more white Southerners voted Republican, driven not only by the issue of race, but also by white evangelical Christians’ opposition to abortion and other “culture war” issues.

DEMOCRATS FROM CLINTON TO OBAMA

After losing five out of six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, Democrats captured the White House in 1992 with Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton’s defeat of the incumbent, George H.W. Bush, as well as third-party candidate Ross Perot.

Clinton’s eight years in office saw the country through a period of economic prosperity but ended in a scandal involving the president’s relationship with a young intern, Monica Lewinsky. Clinton’s conduct in the affair led to his impeachment by the House in 1998; the Senate acquitted him the following year.

Al Gore, Clinton’s vice-president, narrowly captured the popular vote in the general election in 2000, but lost to George W. Bush in the electoral college, after the U.S. Supreme Court called a halt to a manual recount of disputed Florida ballots.

Midway through Bush’s second term, Democrats capitalized on popular opposition to the ongoing Iraq War and regained control of the House and Senate.

In 2008, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois rode a wave of popular discontent and economic concerns during the Great Recession to become the first African-American U.S. president.

Opposition to Obama and his policies, particularly health care reform, fueled the growth of the conservative, populist Tea Party movement, helping Republicans make huge gains in Congress during his two terms in office.

And in 2016, after a tough primary battle with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton captured the Democratic nomination, becoming the first female presidential nominee of any major party in U.S. history.

But against most expectations, Clinton lost in the general election that November to businessman and reality TV star Donald Trump, while Republican gains in congressional elections left Democrats in the minority in both the House and Senate.

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